On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

  “How will we make sure that Kala Akki doesn’t get into trouble?” Rashmi whispered as they all gathered under the sal mal trees up the road and discussed the new rules. The trees filled the air with the smell of buds on the cusp of blooming, nature itself gathering toward the children in solidarity.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Suren said, his voice grim as he leaned against one of the trees. “If it comes down to it, I’ll tell Amma that I will stop playing the piano forever if she won’t let us practice the band.”

  Yes, Suren had changed. He was no longer the good boy who did what was expected, he was the boy who knew the power of promise and whom he could hold hostage by the mere threat of refusing to live up to it.

  “And also if I can’t keep singing,” Rashmi added. “What?” she asked, as the other three turned to look at her. “I can sing too, not just Rose and Dolly, right?” She looked at Suren for confirmation.

  Rashmi really could sing, at long last. Until then she had only possessed a beautiful voice, but she had lacked the yearning that turned a song into a story until she had performed in the variety show. Suren nodded, and Nihil and Devi looked at Rashmi with fresh regard.

  Perhaps it was mere youth that made the Herath children and their friends believe that they were invincible and, also, invisible and inaudible. Or perhaps it was that the younger Heraths, Nihil and Devi, had cajoled Raju, who frankly did not require much prodding, Devi simply had to ask, as well as Lucas and Kamala—both won over by their attendance at the variety show—to assist them in their escapade by standing guard and watching for their mother’s return. Whatever it was, their practices continued, though a few times they were almost caught when Mrs. Herath got a lift back home from one student or another, and once Lucas, and another time Raju, failed to see her until the car reached the Heraths’ gate and she got out from the backseat. Those times found Raju rushing out of his house in his weight-lifting underpants, something he had given up doing after Rashmi had suggested it, trying to start up a conversation with her until Devi could alert the band members that Amma’s back! Stop! Stop! Amma’s back!

  The one person who might have told their mother was Sonna, who, they had begun to notice, always seemed to be at Raju’s house when they were practicing; they could see the top of his head above Raju’s gate as they walked to the Nileses’ house. A few times Nihil had been convinced that it was the sight of him that prevented Sonna from telling their mother and he felt grateful enough to raise his hand in a wave to the older boy, even though each time Sonna only turned away without any sign that he had seen Nihil or his greeting. He did not acknowledge Rashmi, either, even though, full of excitement at having discovered the fissures in her otherwise good-girl reputation, Rashmi made a point of turning to smile and wave at Sonna as they passed.

  Down Sal Mal Lane, the change in Rashmi and Suren and even in the previously dependable Lucas and Kamala went unnoticed by the working adults distracted by the constant political upheavals around them. Upheavals that the children knew about from whispered conversations at school or from the newspapers they glanced at and then discarded, their minds on music and cricket. Even Rashmi, who had so recently made it a practice to read the papers, had given it up in the wake of the variety show.

  A presidential election was announced for the first time in the history of the country, and posters that carried the elephant, the symbol of the government, far outweighed those of the key, the star, the hand, and the bell, the symbols for the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the Communist Party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and the Janatha Vimukthi Peremuna, respectively, and those posters with the elephant symbol remained on walls long after they were supposed to have been taken down. All the adults had opinions about this, some, like the Silvas, in favor, some, like the Heraths, against, but nobody felt able to protest.

  The absorption of the Prevention of Terrorism Act into permanent legislation added another cylinder of fuel to simmering frictions. And what, exactly, did this Act prevent? It did not prevent acts of terrorism, nor vandalism, nor assassinations. It did not foster communal harmony. It was worded to aid in the detention of individuals suspected of terrorism and swiftly became a means to censorship of the press and the restriction of free speech and movement.

  Nihil learned of this when he read the newspaper aloud to Mr. Niles one afternoon. “The Prevention of Terrorism Act prohibits the publication of any material, spoken word, or sign whose language could be considered to be designed to incite to violence, or which is likely to cause racial or communal disharmony or feelings of ill-will or hostility between different communities or racial or religious groups,” he read, then looked up and asked, “What does that mean?”

  An agitated Mr. Niles said, “It means there will be no room for us to discuss right or wrong,” and he took the newspaper away from Nihil and flung it across the room, where it fell elegantly, like a lady’s handkerchief. Mr. Niles’s response startled Nihil and made him stay quiet for a long while until, after he was sure Mr. Niles had drifted off to sleep, he got up, picked up the paper, put it back together, and read the news quietly to himself, saving the sports pages for the end.

  Nihil went home to tell his siblings that “Mr. Niles says discussions have been banned by the government,” a statement they received without much ado, there being no corresponding deprivation that they could relate the news to; all the same rules remained in effect in their house, and even the neighbors who did not talk to one another did so out of choice.

  But Mr. Niles was right. Within such parameters, there was no venue for the airing of grievances or passions, all of which were now tucked away inside homes and hearts that, built as they were for other pursuits, could not contain them for long.

  Far beyond their games of hopscotch, cricket, marbles, and catch, things the children of Sal Mal Lane might have paid attention to were happening. Still, they refused, whenever they could, to look up from chalk squares, keyboards, love notes, theme songs, and, in Devi’s case, her special bicycle rides up and down the road with Raju in attendance. The children’s hideout, tucked among the grove of sal mal trees, gave them an added sense of being removed even from the words of people like Mohan. They retreated there during the hottest time of the afternoons, to sit in its shade and do their homework or talk, sometimes sharing guavas from Mrs. Sansoni, a bag of sweets from Raju, or raw mangoes that Mr. Herath had brought home from the Sunday market. So long as they showed up to be together, to play together, they could pretend that all the larger concerns, which they certainly knew more about now, nonetheless had no bearing on them.

  In the Silva household, what was bad intensified and Mohan brought home leaflets denouncing Tamils. This caused Jith to tremble in his presence and write to Dolly in secret. He dreamed each night of escape while the older Silvas waited for war with a certain smug satisfaction, more sure than they had been of anything in their lives that, when it came, they would be on the side of the winners, though every now and again Mrs. Silva glanced wistfully toward the Herath house and wished that she had another lady to talk to down the lane, the kind that she knew Mrs. Herath could be if she really wanted to. Until then, Mrs. Silva had to content herself in continuing to lay the groundwork, as she thought of it, making occasional small talk that skirted around the things she really wanted to say in the hope that when it was time, when the full force of evidence was before her, Mrs. Herath would come around to understanding that they, Mrs. Herath and Mrs. Silva, were on the same side. There would be gratitude on Mrs. Herath’s part then, Mrs. Silva was sure of it.

  Mohan spent more time with Sonna, standing at the bottom of the lane with young men whom Sonna introduced to Mohan as his friends though one or the other of those men was constantly being locked up and bailed out of the Wellawatte prison for misdemeanors ranging from drunken fights to petty thefts. If Mohan found their behavior objectionable, he did not say. He had developed an air of bravado and laughed loudly alongside them at bawdy jokes his mother would have blanched to hear.r />
  “Have you seen the Heraths recently?” he might ask Sonna, egging him on. “They seem to spend all their time at that Niles house.”

  “Pansy fuckers,” Sonna might say, though when he said those words he thought only of Suren. “They don’ know anythin’ ’bout anythin’ but know how to sing pop songs.” They smacked each other on the back and thanked their lucky stars that they were not like them, those girly homos, those cowards.

  Sonna had also taken to spending nights away from home. He left after dinner and sometimes did not return for days. Neither Francie Bolling, who was afraid of both her son and her husband, nor Jimmy Bolling, who did not care, asked Sonna where he went and what he did when he was gone, though Francie Bolling did accept the wads of money he would bring back and give to her when his father was not around.

  And because he rarely saw Sonna anymore and because when he did see him, Sonna was usually in a foul mood, either scolding his mother or yelling at Raju, Nihil stopped waving to him and decided that Mr. Niles was right, Sonna was a bad boy by choice.

  “I don’t think you should be waving to Sonna,” he told Rashmi one evening as they walked to the Nileses’ house, she to her lesson, he to visit Mr. Niles to discuss his progress with cricket.

  “Why?” she asked, tossing her head and smiling at Nihil, at his concern about whom she chose to wave to.

  “He’s a bad boy,” Nihil said.

  “I don’t care,” Rashmi said. “It’s not like he’s my friend. I’m just waving to him.” And, just to harass Nihil a little, she ran back the way they had come, stood on tiptoe, and smiled and waved with even more enthusiasm at Sonna, then waited to see what he would do. He made no move in response, though he stared at her standing there, her hair brushed out and loose down her back in its waves, the teasing in her eyes, her bangles making music, lost in his own dark imaginings. Eventually, when it was clear that he would not respond, Rashmi turned away, her good humor gone.

  “I told you,” Nihil said.

  Rashmi did not disagree.

  Despite their continued difficulties with Sonna, in the Bolling house, with two girls engaged in one way or another with “good” families, Jith having been disassociated from the politics of his parents by a sleight of mind that weighted his timidity more and his origins less, the older Bollings regarded themselves as having done well by their children. They began to dress better and speak more soberly. There were fewer arguments and more appearances in public.

  In the Nileses’ house, three people were revived by the daily presence of children who slammed doors and creaked gates and muddied the floor and dropped crumbs that brought with them armies of red ants that made Kala Niles get down on her hands and knees at night, rubbing the edges of doorways with kerosene oil in a half hearted attempt to keep them away. Those children turned the house of the Unmarried and the Dying into a house full of the Future.

  In the Herath household, much had changed, mostly for Rashmi, who had discovered what Devi had known all along: life was too short for rules made by nuns and older women for little girls. It took a while for her lay teachers and nuns to realize that Rashmi was no longer the golden girl she had once been, because she had earned that time by doing what every smart student knows how to do: be impeccable in behavior and superior in class-work for the first four weeks of school when teachers were distracted and welcomed any evidence of scholarship, and ride the glory until the end of the year. Not this year.

  When the second-term tests came around and the report cards were handed out, the evidence was, well, evident: three B’s sat, one under the other, for Sinhala, Buddhism, and Maths.

  “I am quite sure that she studied hard for these tests, Sister,” Mrs. Herath declared as she sat across the desk from the Sister Principal, Sister Stanislaus, and tried not to look at her husband. Whatever her feelings about Rashmi at home, she refused to allow someone from the outside to cast doubt on her daughter’s character.

  Mr. Herath leaned forward, amicably. “Yes, there is no need for all this fuss. She always gets A’s, she’ll get A’s again.” He leaned back, satisfied with his contribution and thinking ahead to the afternoon of meetings he had to attend.

  Mrs. Herath herself did not feel up to paying too much attention just then to Sister Stanislaus. Like every other adult in the country, she, too, was caught up in contemplating the outcome of the presidential elections, which were barreling toward them. Right now, her mind was on the possibility of curfews and the necessity to stock up on rice and dhal and tins of Jack Mackerel.

  Sister Stanislaus picked up a stack of Rashmi’s report cards going all the way back to kindergarten, all of them pale blue, and rapped them on the desk. She then spread them out and examined each one through glasses that perched at the tip of her nose, the long golden beads of the chain on which they were hung swinging gently next to her sharp-featured face. Finding nothing there that could really qualify as a problem, but for this last set of results, she looked up finally and turned her gaze on Mr. Herath.

  “Well, you must be very busy, Mr. Herath, with the elections?” she said.

  Mrs. Herath stiffened. Her husband had barely made it to this appointment, brushing it off with a summons to the prime minister’s office comment that even she, despite her years of experience listening to him, could not decipher.

  “I am not involved in the elections,” he said, chuckling with amusement, “I am an official. My job will be to oversee procedure and verify the count at the polling booths. And vote, of course. I’ll be doing that.”

  “It is unfortunate that the country does not seem to be going the way we want it to,” Sister Stanislaus said. Neither of the Heraths said anything, and she continued. “The whole business last year with the riots, you know, it was not easy for our Tamil girls.”

  “There was no rioting here,” Mr. Herath said mildly.

  “No, of course not,” Sister Stanislaus said, airily, as though riots and convents would never inhabit the same universe. “Not here. Still, unrest anywhere . . .”

  “Those were some isolated incidents. The army should have been dispatched right away, but these jokers . . .” Mr. Herath felt a sharp pain in his sandal-clad right foot. He glanced at his wife. “. . . anyway, we’ll see. The elections may change everything.”

  “Oh, our girls come from families that support the government, no doubt about it,” Sister Stanislaus said, the note of accusation quite obvious. Her hierarchy of alignments was so clear to the Heraths it was almost as if she had listed it off: Catholics of any race, Hindu Tamils, Muslims, and last of all the group to which the two of them belonged, the anti-government Sinhalese-Buddhists.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Herath said, smoothly, “and my husband works for the government too. As do I, after all, as a teacher I too am a government servant, isn’t that so? And our children are all good students,” and here she faltered before finishing, “all of them.”

  “Well, Devi—” Sister Stanislaus said.

  “Devi is doing quite well, according to her teachers,” Mrs. Herath said, “and we are here to discuss Rashmi.”

  And though Rashmi was discussed for twenty more minutes, no compromise was struck, for the Heraths would not agree that there was anything amiss with a child with three sudden B’s after a lifetime of A’s. Fresh on the heels of this meeting, when the new class monitors were being chosen, and Rashmi was not only nominated, the nomination was seconded, and the votes were cast by an overwhelming majority in her favor, the class teacher, a nun named Sister Francesca, decided unilaterally to eliminate the function of class monitor.

  “You had to go and open your mouth and talk about governments and jokers, didn’t you?” Mrs. Herath berated her husband, when Rashmi told her. “Now they’ll be penalizing the girls until they graduate.”

  “They should go to a different school, then,” Mr. Herath said. “We don’t need to pay school fees to a pack of anti-Buddhist, anti-Sinhalese . . .”

  “It’s not about being anti-Buddhist
and anti-Sinhalese. It’s about keeping your mouth shut. Rashmi was doing so well and I’m sure she would have been made a prefect. Now even that is not certain.”

  Listening hard outside the door, Rashmi tried to feel a pang of disappointment, but all she felt was sheer delight.

  Yes, much had changed in the Herath family, between Nihil’s return to cricket, Rashmi’s ascent as a performer and her corresponding descent as a scholar, and Suren’s steadfast march toward the kind of independence that would never again be controlled by parental expectation, he had shrugged off that yoke conclusively. One person remained the same: Devi.

  An Election

  Well, one thing had changed for Devi. Thanks to Nihil’s return to cricket, Raju was now her constant guardian. Each afternoon, when she returned home from school, and after she had her lunch, and finished her homework according to Nihil’s timetable, she went to the gate to holler for him.

  “Uncle Raju! Uncle Raju!” she would call, waiting until she could see him to dart outside her gate.

  “Coming coming, Uncle Raju is coming,” Raju would say, shuffling into his slippers and buttoning up his shirt as though he had been surprised, though he had been sitting on his front veranda since half past noon, a full hour and a half before Devi even got home, reading and re reading the newspaper and waiting for purpose.

  Most days, Devi’s request was for the bicycle, which had first rested against the wall just inside the door to Raju’s weight-lifting room and then, because he was worried that he might trip and break it with one of his barbells, had been moved to the Heraths’ unused garage. On those days the procedure was always the same.

  “I can ride the bike without you, Uncle Raju,” Devi would say, after Raju wheeled the bike out for her. She would stand there, her hands behind her back, dressed in some outfit that Kamala had laid out for her, a freshly ironed T-shirt and pedal pushers usually, brown sandals on her feet, the picture of competence.